This is an essay by Jack Sexton, written for Writing Place last year. I've included it here because it is a wonderful (HD quality) example of an historical essay of place: personal, experimental, meditative, and historically rigorous.
This is an abbreviated version of my comments for this essay last year:
Jack. Hard to tell you how inspired I was by this essay. I was drawn in from the start by your intimate introduction, its tone so different from that of your seminar discussion paper. And I loved your ending, with the image of the coin, and your reference to an untarnished Monticello in spite of the critical reflection it has incited in recent years.
As I said in class, it's always hard to pull off a more experimental style and structure in a scholarly context. This discussion (sometimes moving, sometimes meditative and then sharp) certainly succeeds in this. Really liked your observation that mid-nineteenth century visitors to Monticello focused on the landscape, while those from the 1880s focused on the house. You could have done more to draw out the reasons for this, though, particularly re the earlier nineteenth-century descriptions of the landscape. I would also have liked you to have persuaded me more as to why your own childhood impressions of Monticello bypassed the way the place was imagined in twentieth century America. Your references to your own diet of historical epics and novels didn't illuminate this for me. Perhaps you could have provided a little more discussion of why and how Jefferson came to be 'an emblem of your boyhood', and how this meshed with the way he was historicised in America post-1880s.
Your point that an interest in Monticello the house came with a burgeoning nationalism in the US, and the interest in things historical that accompanied it, was well-made. So were you postscripts re more recent and ambiguous (and yet nonetheless sentimental) renditions of Monticello.
Many thanks for this discussion! - Melissa